strange little girls
by bellmare
Summary: Celestia has propositions; Kirigiri has no intention of agreeing. — Kirigiri/Celestia.


**Notes; for the DR kink meme; contains biting, glovekink and vampirism-play? Or something like that.**

**.**

Celestia's always been a good liar.

She starts small - begins with little, innocent white lies that mean nothing and lead nowhere. She lies about finishing her homework, about the Uno cards fanned in her hand, about washing the dishes and eating all her vegetables. Later she starts to lie about bigger, bolder things - stealing money from her mother's purse to buy cheap costume jewellery; about how many aces she's got in her hand; how many boys and girls she's kissed; about who she saw slipping into an alley after a boy, a girl with a smile sharp as knives and the glint of scissors in her hands. Lying is addictive; Celestia loves the taste of the falsehoods as they pass her lips, the little shivering thrill that runs down her spine at the knowledge of another gullible fool manipulated.

Kyouko Kirigiri, she thinks, is no such fool; no weak, mewling sycophant with a pliable mind easily led astray.

"I imagine," Kirigiri says coolly, "that your reasons are weak, at best. Are you really so afraid that you'll be attacked in the night?"

Celestia smiles coyly at her, bats her lashes at Kirigiri who gazes stonily at her, unmoved. Night-time crawls ever closer, its approach demarcated by the whispering _tick, tick_ of the clock on the wall. She'll have to get business over and done with before the cafeteria's locked. "I can't help it! Especially after that unfortunate incident with Maizono, you know ..." She allows her voice to trail off, lifts her eyes to meet Kirigiri's. "After your repeated assurances on being able to protect yourself, I thought, oh, maybe we could, hmm, _collaborate_? Girls like us have to look after one another in a cruel world like this, don't we?"

Kirigiri smiles thinly. Her eyes are cold and reptilian and starless - what a frigid bitch, Celestia thinks idly; maybe the rest of her is cold, too, and the thought sends a low hum of excitement through her. "Please understand if I'm not as ready to trust you. I have no intention of ending up like Kuwata."

"Of course not," Celestia purrs. "I have absolutely no ill-intention! Really! I'm as terrified as you are ... if not more," she adds.

"Is this all a pretence to circumvent the night-time rule, I wonder," Kirigiri says, her mouth still curling into that taut little fishhook smile. "I thought as the Queen of Liars you could invent better reasons than that."

"You wound me so much! This isn't a pretence, how could you possibly be so callous-?" She smiles over the table at Kirigiri and Kirigiri smiles back; Celestia's reminded of two cats watching one another, waiting for an excuse to claw, to bite and to tear. She's used to lying and cheating, accustomed to playing her cards mercilessly to get her way; come what may, Kirigiri, she thinks, will bare her throat for her. Her mouth twitches; Kirigiri studies her with interest and then laughs, a short, sharp sound.

"Mm, perhaps my assessment of you was a mere overestimation, then. You evidently haven't played against those who know how to read minds," she says and Celestia's heart almost stops.

"Excuse me?" The look in Kirigiri's eyes turns almost smug and Celstia wants to snarl, to wrap her hands around Kirigiri's thin, pale throat and squeeze. What a waste, she thinks, Kirigiri's got a really nice throat and it'll look all the better laid out before her. "I thought you were above such silliness."

"Hardly." Kirigiri's chair-legs squeak against the linoleum floor as she stands. "I just have good intuition."

Celestia stares at her and then begins to laugh. "Oh, I see, is this how you're honouring the fallen, by picking up their mannerisms?"

Kirigiri's eyes narrow in a prelude to a smile, insincere as the one Celestia draws across her lips with garnet-bright lipstick. She will be the Persephone to Celestia's Hades, the one who loses to a gamble hedged on a pomegranate kiss.

"Perhaps," Kirigiri replies at last. She makes no attempt to move away, not even when Celestia reaches across the table towards her hand. "What are you doing?"

"Prepositioning you, of course," Celestia says. The leather beneath her palm is smooth and soft - kidskin, perhaps, or something equally expensive. She shivers, imagines the way Kirigiri's hands feel under them - soft as well, of course, fine and slender. What thin wrists she has. Celestia can circle them with her thumb and forefinger; she wants to curl her fingers around them, to run her thumbnail over the smooth curves of Kirigiri's bones, to press her lips to the bluish knot of veins where her palm meets her wrist and _bite_, to sink her teeth into the soft flesh and _grind._ She shudders, at the thought of the coppery tang of Kirigiri's blood in her mouth, her tongue lapping against Kirigiri's wrist, her cuspids and canines flush against Kirigiri's skin. Red will look good with Kirigiri's faded palette, though not as good as it looks on her, not as good as it looks on Celestia; she's been wearing those colours - the colours of the cards and conquest and murder, long before Kirigiri. "I want to change your mind, it'd be so very valuable to have someone like you on my side ... together, you and I, we could make it out-"

Kirigiri runs a languid hand through her hair and flicks the braided lock over her shoulder. "Oh, I see, someone to deliberately flub the investigation, you mean? And then as we're watching you walk free you'll be laughing over your good fortune and having such good, dutiful little pawns, I suppose."

This time Celestia actually hisses, low and sibilant, drawing it out into a dry, rasping laugh that peters out halfway through the third, mocking _ha_. She thinks of the blood humming through Kirigiri's veins, gazes fixedly at the pulse beating on her thin, pale throat and what it would feel like to break the skin with the scrape of her teeth. "Oh, so you think you have me all figured out, do you?"

"Of course I do. Watching your mannerisms and subconscious actions are child's play. You look to your left a lot, you know, you might want to work on that."

When words aren't enough, Celestia knows alternate methods to get her way. To her credit, Kirigiri does not bat an eyelid when Celestia circles the table, does not do her the favour of looking doubtful. "You're so presumptuous, you know? How sad it must be in your paranoid little head."

"On the contrary," Kirigiri whispers. She slides her hand away from under Celestia's, grasping her wrist instead. Celestia can feel the strength of her grip; she half-turns her head, lazily reaches to grasp Kirigiri's other hand. She raises Kirigiri's hand to her lips, feeliing Kirigiri's eyes on her, then strokes her knuckles, imagining how they'd look under the glove - their pearly jut against the thin skin of the back of her hand, her veins stark against their paleness. Celestia runs her teeth over Kirigiri's knuckles and Kirigiri sucks in a breath. "Hardly a presumption," she says and her voice is not as flat as before; it jumps at the last syllable and Celestia smiles against Kirigiri's fingers. "I suppose you think this is just business as usual for you, then?"

"But of course," Celestia says and leans forward. Kirigiri watches her; Celestia cants her head towards the watching cameras, at the clock. "Before that, perhaps we should take this elsewhere. It won't do for the others to think we're, god forbid! _Attacking_ each other, now, can we?"

"Quite," Kirigiri says. She hooks her fingers under Celestia's tie and pulls her close, close enough for Celestia to feel her breath against her cheek. Kirigiri's knuckles brush against her throat; she shivers at the scrape of the metal studs running over her skin. "Your excitement and haste to get going," Kirigiri murmurs, "could be misconstrued as something more ... fight or flight, perhaps. The dilation of your pupils, your heart rate - you may be good at fooling others, but the body often betrays the mind."

.

Kirigiri's room is bare, sterile. Celestia wrinkles her nose. "How boring," she says. Kirigiri's brows rise. "But then, just what I expect from a boring person. You, you're all about statistics and proof and empiricism. Where's the fun in that?"

"They're all proven facts, though," Kirigiri says as though she hasn't heard a word Celestia said. "You look to your left a lot. That's because you have no memories to recall, do you?"

"I can recall the important things," Celestia replies. "That's all that matters. It'd do you good to learn that people aren't just experiments, that they don't all act according to set paradigms of behaviour."

"Oh-?"

The annoyance bubbles at the back of Celestia's mind. She wants to say, _it wasn't an invitation or a challenge, it wasn't an opening statement_, but instead she leans forward and kisses Kirigiri. Kirigiri makes a soft sound at the back of her throat and grabs her wrist, then twists her around in an armlock. She rests her chin on Celestia's shoulder; her free hand slides across Celestia's hips and Celestia can almost feel the cool leather against her skin, pressed through layers of silk and lace.

"What the hell," Celestia snarls. Kirigiri leans against her, pushing her against the wall. She's going to kill Kirigiri, going to dig her nails into Kirigiri's skin and claw and pull. "I was just trying to prove you wrong! This is no way to treat a lady, you know!"

"Your argument is flawed," Kirigiri announces. "Besides, in science, you can never truly say you have proven a hypothesis." She loosens her grip, allows Celestia to turn towards her and draw her closer. "Forgive me, it was a knee-jerk reaction." Her voice lowers as she watches Celestia from beneath lowered lashes; Celestia nips at the line of her jaw, then licks a slow, languid stripe down the side of her neck. There's so much life there, soft and warm and humming; all the better to bite into, she thinks. Kirigiri moans softly when Celestia runs her teeth across the column of her throat; her head lolls back against her shoulders and Celestia leans back to admire the flush rising up Kirigiri's throat, to savour the sensation of Kirigiri's pulse hammering beneath her fingertips.

"... it pays to be well-versed in self-defensive measures," Kirigiri is saying; her gaze is hazy, pupils dilated. "And, and I do not like being wrong." She pauses, draws in a shuddering breath; the chords of her throat shift and rise beneath Celestia's lips. "You say you recall only things of importance?"

"How to survive," Celestia breathes as she grasps Kirigiri's hand, brings it to her lips. The leather of Kirigiri's gloves is smooth and supple; she meets Kirigiri's eyes and moves to tug it off but Kirigiri's hand clenches. The leather squeaks, softly.

"No," Kirigiri says in a voice like a cold snap, suddenly businesslike. "I'm afraid the gloves stay."

Celestia watches her, then laughs. "Suit yourself, I don't mind." She stops only when Kirigiri's other hand slips up her skirt, when the cool leather brushes against her thighs. "I don't mind," she says again when Kirigiri presses her palm against her and dips her hand between her legs, stroking with her fingertips. All she can feel are the points of contact between them - her mouth on Kirigiri's throat, Kirigiri's fingers sliding inside her, Kirigiri's hand over her mouth as her head rolls back against the wall. She bites against the palm of Kirigiri's glove as Kirigiri curls her fingers inside her, strokes her clit with her thumb as Celestia bites down on her knuckles, digging her teeth into the soft kidskin. She cards her hands through Kirigiri's hair and pulls as Kirigiri hooks her fingers into Celestia's jaw and Celestia laps at her fingers, licks long streaks from fingertip to knuckle, from index to ring finger.

"There's, no need, for that," she gasps around Kirigiri's fingers. "The rooms are, soundproofed, you know."

"I cannot afford," Kirigiri whispers, "to take chances," and then her hand stills. She slides her fingers from Celestia's mouth and strokes her cheek; the leather is warm, slippery against her skin. "You were telling me, about remembering only things of importance. What do you-"

"I," Celestia says, wishing Kirigiri would start moving again - anything, to ease the knot in her belly, the heat between her legs. "I dream about death. In my dreams-" She breaks off as Kirigiri's fingers trace slow circles inside her, then hisses when she stops again. "In my dreams, I'm a vampire and the world is my oyster for me to pick, and then, and then-" Her voice falters; she grinds against Kirigiri's motionless hand, wishing, god, Kirigiri's such a tease with her poker face and her stupidly calm voice, why doesn't she move, _damn it_. She runs her teeth along Kirigiri's throat and sucks, licks at the soft skin as Kirigiri's hand jerks and begins to move, erratically. "Everybody serves me and only me, I'm the queen of everything and the king of nothing and I take everything they have and drain them until there's nothing left-"

Kirigiri takes her time, slides her fingers in and out but she's smiling - and then Celestia bites her, hard, on the shoulder as she comes and her world is spinning and tilting and full of Kirigiri, Kirigiri with her mirthless smile that doesn't reach her eyes.

She slumps against Kirigiri and Kirigiri's talking, her voice cool and businesslike - "a fallacy," she's saying like she's reading off a shopping list or something. "You dreams are exactly that. Empty dreams, hollow fantasies. A Queen of Corpses ruling over a world of the dead. It's not as romantic as you think it is, surrounded by bodies. They distend," Kirigiri says placidly. "Bacteria would breed beneath the skin and then the flesh-flies and carrion-beetles would come and lay their maggots; in hours rot and rigor mortis would set in and there would be no servants to die for your whims. The dead are rarely pretty, you understand."

_Shut up_, Celestia wants to say, but instead she untangles herself from Kirigiri and smooths down her skirt and straightens her headpiece and smiles. She still wants to rip Kirigiri's head off, cut her open in a neat Y-incision and pull out everything she detests - the calm, the composure, the cold clinical indifference - and sew her back up. _Dramatic irony_, she thinks, and wants to laugh.

"I guess my attempt at persuasion was futile?" she asks. Kirigiri smiles stiffly; it's answer enough. As Celestia heads back to her own room, she pauses just outside Kirigiri's door, then glances back at her, silhouetted in the frame. "You know, you should take what I said with a grain of salt. All this talk of dreams and memory ... sometimes, I think about what I really want and then think, maybe I don't even know myself."

Kirigiri's mouth tightens. She fusses with her collar, turns it up and tightens her tie to hide the crescent-moon marks of Celestia's teeth. Oh, how she wishes she had broken the skin, how she wishes she had canines like knife-edges, sharp enough to dig into Kirigiri's jugular. "You can't fool everyone," she says. "Not even yourself."

"I know," Celestia says and thinks about her identification card, of the common, filthy name stamped across it and the girl without dreams attached to it. "I know."


End file.
